NO DEATH PENALTY.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 1 October 1925, Page 2

NO DEATH PENALTY.

NEW,SOUTH WALES BILL. PROPOSED PRISON REFORMS. SYDNEY, Sept. 24. If the Bill which the New South Wales Government has passed through the legislative Assembly successfully negotiates the Legislative Council also without amendment, there will be no further hangings in New South Wales, at all events under the Labour regime, even for cold-blooded, carefully -planned murder or treason. Already the. Government has commuted to penal servitude several sentences of death, but with the passing of this legislation criminal®, in the . vvorst degree, escape the extreme penalty. The Opposition, in order to try at least to modify this drastic leform, attempted to provide that capital punishment should be abolished except 311 cases of murder, treason, rape and cai_ 11a 1 knowledge in the ease of children under 10 years of age, but the Govern, liient was adamant. Sydney, in some of its more squalid and darker spots, lias never been the safest- place in the world at night. To move about these spots now will probably be even a. little more hazardous, for even penal servitude for life, as a substitute for hanging, does not always mean, what it says. Occasionally 1 the. executive intervenes and allows' a. murderer out after he has served a number of years in gaol. Then there is the proposal of one or the Labour Ministers to make prison a little brighter place, and to so reform the prison system as to provide, in effect, for evening lectures, debates, the provision of text hooks, and of a schoolmaster to assist prisoners when they may he in difficulties over their lessons between the visits of the lecturers fir classes in economics, -and. for higher education generally. The hardened old criminal will probably smirk as he sits down- in a class for the discussion, of the principles of European history, for example. One can easily picture • Bill Sikes walking into gaoif or being driven into it, and coming nit a little later a typical highbrow. . •